Books Ghosts

Prince George writer Ian Gibbs takes a ghostly ride back through Calgary

There is something cathartic about revisiting the city where you spent your formative years and discovering that there was something different about how you saw the world around you.

For writer, podcaster, and ghost-walk flâneur Ian Gibbs, he developed a keen sense of something extra while growing up in Stampede City — a keen extrasensory perception.

“I can remember experiencing things when we lived in England, but being so young, I had no language around it,” he recalled. “Then when we lived in Calgary, I kept running into things. It was a good place to do that.”

The challenge of opening up and admitting to having an extrasensory perception similar to an empath was his conservative, religious upbringing. Still, as a boy, he took a shine to his new hometown of Calgary.

When Ian was four, the Gibbs family immigrated to Calgary from Welwyn, Hertfordshire, U.K.. He remained in Calgary until he left to go to school in Toronto to become a youth worker. After three years in Saint John, New Brunswick, and four more years in Winnipeg, he would return to British Columbia for his master’s in social sciences.

And that personal experience factors into his latest book, Calgary’s Most Haunted: Urban Hauntings and Personal Encounters in Stampede City.

“This is the book I really enjoyed writing,” the 52-year-old said. “I knew I was happy with it when I read the book 1,900 times and I was still snickering at some of my jokes, and thinking, ‘That was funny.’”

He travelled through time, touching on the origins of the city, Heritage Park and one house in particular, the Lougheed House on 13 Avenue SW, which was an enjoyable voyage. It was the first house in the city to have plumbing. Although, the Lougheeds wanted to show off their pipes, so they put all of them on the outside of the house, “which must have done really well in the winter,” Gibbs said, with a hint of sarcasm. And yes, it’s haunted.

One story in particular made him take a break after writing the chapter. The origin of the ghost story is rooted in the early 1990s and at a nightclub in the Stephen Avenue Mall area. A young woman lost her life in the nightclub.

“There are conflicting stories about what happened to her, but the bottom line is she ended up dead in the bathroom of this club,” he said, adding that as he wrote about her story, and her presence in the old sandstone bank building, he felt her with him. “I wrote her story and I had to walk away … I don’t know how to explain it; I could almost feel her grief. It was a crazy experience.”

Having grown up in Calgary, there’s a sense of pride in knowing your hometown well, but Gibbs learned even more about Stampede City during his research.

“I always had Calgary chalked up in my mind as ‘If it ain’t broke, knock it down and build a new one’,” Gibbs said, with a laugh. “That was kind of the unofficial city motto from what I could tell. But when you get into it, there’s actually quite a bit of history and there are people who are actively trying to preserve it.”

In total, the book took a year to pull together. With due diligence, Gibbs pulled the book together within that time. He learned to be mobile with his writing, purchasing a laptop and following the philosophy of Alfred Lord Tennyson, writing in the wilds.

“It was nice to learn so much about a city that I thought I knew really well and it turned out I didn’t,” he said, with a laugh. “It turned out I had no idea about the origins of Calgary.”

Gibbs has been busy with his podcast Ghosts and Bears which he does with partner Jason Kelly. He’s also busy with the book launch, writing another book (the working title is Canada’s Most Haunted), working full-time for the government and starting his own ghost walk company in his current hometown Prince George.

He’s been doing the ghost walks since June (every last weekend of the month) but has stepped up his schedule by planning walks for every weekend in October — except when he’s in Calgary — and one special one Halloween night.

“Those are just selling like crazy,” he said, adding it’s a chance for him to revisit the 10 years he spent doing ghost walks in Victoria, B.C. with John Adams. “At first, I thought there’s no way. There are not enough ghost stories, but I pretty much realized yeah there are.”

Calgary’s Most Haunted: Urban Hauntings and Personal Encounters in Stampede City is available online through Touchwood Editions and in bookstores on October 1. For those in Calgary, Gibbs will hold an official book launch at Shelf Life Books (100-1302 4th Street SW) in Calgary at 2 p.m. on October 19.

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